This isn’t the admission of vulnerability that one would expect from the self-proclaimed “Antichrist Superstar,” who once boasted about shoving sewing needles underneath his fingernails for personal amusement. But last night, the hard-rock subversive and close friend Johnny Depp got matching back tattoos of the original cover to Charles Baudelaire’s poetry collection The Flowers of Evil -- a skeleton whose arm bones melt into the branches of a tree. Despite his legendary absinthe and narcotics consumption, Manson apparently remains governed by the same nervous system as the rest of us.

“All the scars -- musical, physical, mental, emotional -- they’re what define you,” says Manson. At 48, he has weathered the deaths of both parents, a divorce from burlesque dancer Dita Von Teese and the dissolution of several other high-profile relationships.